𝐇(𝐀)𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 | yandere! dazai osamu

9 / 15

Your head feels like a steam train. You blink open your eyes and cringe at the bright, hot summer rays that burst through the windows.

You wake up and you're back in the living room, splayed out on the couch at the foyer, and you fall off the couch when you bolt up.

You grope your bra and when the cool surface of the photos presses against your flesh, you sigh in relief. You tentatively touch your neck but hold it when it doesn't hurt.

You yank the phone lodged in the cushion and check your reflection on the black screen—no bruises on your skin.

"What the fuck..." You toss the phone and sprint to the painting room at the very end of the hallway and kick the door open. Your bewildered eyes soak in the view: the paintings were all back to normal, their still subjects staring back at you as if you were the insane one; the fruit was still blackened and soft with handfuls of flies buzzing noisily around it. You clumsily close the door and lean against it. Your fingers pinch the space between your brows. Again, you bring a hand back to your neck and gingerly squeeze it. No pain.

"But...how..." You absentmindedly walk back into the library and write down on the piece of paper.

- Paintings had no one in them when I walked in, door shut when I tried to get out.

- Heard someone argue outside, and someone trying to get in, hid underneath a sheet after hearing a voice, the hallways were lit, walked to a room at the end, got strangled?

You decide to put down the paper and try to read something to keep your mind off the strange events that had unfurled that night, yet it kept coming back to you. Who was it that came into the room? Why were they looking for you? Did the house look like that when people actually lived in it? Why were they arguing? Why did you get strangled? Why did you wake up in the foyer—

"Was it a dream?" You incredulously ask yourself. You reread the paper, reciting the chemicals that were printed on the bottles, before pouncing to the bookshelves in hopes of at least finding documentation of the house's history; any indication that the owner existed.

Yet as you spent the morning chewing on dried fruit and rummaging through the piles of dusty, unread books, you couldn't find anything. However, your mind seemed to have zapped back into the present when you found a book about Japanese deities and Buddhism. You flipped open the heavy front cover and your eyes scoured over the pictures of large, colorful Buddhist temples, their arches and faded colors denoting human frailty in the eyes of human creation. It was strange, you thought, that everything we created managed to die after us. Parents died before their children, and architectures died before the complete erosion of their structures.

How were your parents, anyway?

You flip the page and you find the bronze statue of a Yakushiji, the Buddha bodhisattva of medicine, healing, and salvation. Something in your heart hurts and twists with every word your eyes absorbed, as if it was desperately attempting to rewind time: go back, go back, I'm warning you now, I'll give out if you keep doing this.

You slam the book shut. Your chest pounds and you clench your eyes close.

Instead, you decide to read No Longer Human by the pile of books.

—

Squeak!

You look up, halfway through the book.

Squeak squeak!

Something creaks in the wall and the wallpaper budges—a mouse wriggles out the wood planks and then sprints away. You throw the book away and immediately start to run after it, a grin on your smile.